Rationally Speaking #34 - Celebrities and the Damage They Can Do

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2011

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If the recent hoopla about the royal wedding wasn’t enough to remind you, we live in a culture of celebrity, one where famous people command our attention and often pontificate on things they know nothing about. Obvious examples include the nonsense spewed out by Prince Charles about alternative medicine, and the former model Jenny McCarthy and her dangerous notion that vaccines are harmful because they cause autism. But these, of course, are easy targets. What are we to make of Ray Kurzweil (he of Singularity fame), who recently co-authored a book with a homeopath? Or of otherwise savvy political commentator Bill Maher, who doesn’t trust vaccines or anything coming from “Western” medicine? And then there are highly respectable intellectuals, like Stephen Hawking, who write off entire fields of inquiry (philosophy, in his case), without apparently knowing much about them.

So what is going on here? Why do so many people listen to Jenny McCarthy? And why do so many bright minds go public with ridiculous notions? Is there a pattern? Can we do something to defend ourselves and the public from the celebrity attack on reason?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEptics.org.
0:30.6	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:40.9	I'm your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.
0:46.0	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:48.0	Massimo, our topic today is celebrities and the damage they can do.
0:51.8	We're going to talk about the phenomenon of celebrities using the spotlight to pontificate
0:56.3	about things they don't have expertise in, and in many cases on which they don't have their
1:00.5	facts straight.
1:02.7	Pontificating, it's one of my favorite activities.
1:05.0	I borrow that word from you.
1:06.4	Oh, thank you.
1:07.8	Yes, it's usually it's the Pope that does it.
1:09.6	That's where the word comes from.
1:30.2	Oh, that's right. The Pope is the pontifix maximus. The one who maximally punctuates. That's great. Which adds that extra for some of irony when you talk about Jenny McCarthy pontificating. So some of the standard examples of the phenomenon we're referring to here come from entertainment.
1:36.2	So yeah, Jenny McCarthy talking about vaccines causing autism or Bill Maher slamming Western medicine.
1:41.0	But we're also going to try to touch on people who actually are experts in one technical field who give their opinion about topics outside of their area of expertise.
1:45.5	So I'll start out. Massimo, you asked a bunch of questions in the teaser for this episode
1:51.6	around this general topic. So to frame this discussion, I organized them a little bit. I think
1:56.6	they fall into three categories. First, why do celebrities talk about things they don't have
2:00.6	expertise in? Second, why are they given a platform to speak about these issues? And third,
2:05.7	finally, why do people listen to them and why are they influenced by them? Yeah, I mean,
	...

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